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Date Posted: 09:25:54 05/04/25 Sun
Author: Mark
Author Host/IP: 75.162.108.162
Subject: Re: New Smoke City - The Gretchen Chronicles UPDATED!
In reply to: AusNick 's message, "Re: New Smoke City - The Gretchen Chronicles UPDATED!" on 01:40:28 05/04/25 Sun

It's an easy trap for a writer to fall into. A given scene or chapter requires a new character introduction and then comes the need to follow through with that introduction. Play this over of multiple chapters and, in this case, over 25 years, and before you know it, you have an overpopulated franchise and the universe becomes very difficult to manage. In my Trevor series, when the chapters were set a month or so apart, character management was easier because if there was no place for a character in a chapter, you could just pick their storyline up the next time. But with Gretchen, where the new chapters are set in real time and are thus typically a year apart, excluding characters in each chapter leads to them aging out of relevance. Moving forward, I'm gonna have to find a way to cull the herd, but it won't be easy.

Glad to hear you enjoy the Gretchen series. Thank you for the compliments. It's the series I plan to keep doing into perpetuity, whereas I plan to end the Breanna series after 10 chapters. This creates the most opportunities but also the most risks since the Gretchen series is such an untamed steer, stampeding ahead with no long-term plan or endgame in sight.

The Trevor series was by leaps and bounds my favorite and the one I'm most proud of for an extremely long list of reasons, but one of the biggest was that I was able to structure it with a finishing line and weave the character profiles and individual narratives toward that end point. It's a healthy exercise for a writer to function in multiple stylistic worlds, but the Gretchen format makes it easier to lose momentum and enthusiasm. It doesn't help that my available time for writing has dropped by about 80% compared to five years ago.

If you could do with the Gretchen volume what you did with the Trevor volume, that would be great, but I don't know much about online storage capacity limits so go ahead and do whatever is most practical. I trust your judgment and look forward to what you come up with. Thanks again.

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